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Abstract
This chapter is excerpted from ‘Educating for Values-Driven Leadership: Giving Voice to Values Across the Curriculum'. Despite four decades of good faith effort to teach Ethics in business schools, readers of the business press are still greeted on a regular basis with headlines about egregious excess and scandal. It becomes reasonable to ask why these efforts have not been working. Business faculty in ethics courses spend a lot of time teaching theories of ethical reasoning and analyzing those big, thorny dilemmas - triggering what one professor called 'ethics fatigue.' Some students find such approaches intellectually engaging; others find them tedious and irrelevant. Either way, sometimes all they learn is how to frame the case to justify virtually any position, no matter how cynical or self-serving. Utilitarianism, after all, is tailor-made for a free market economy. As for those 'ethical dilemmas,' too often they are couched as choices that only a chief executive could love - because only a CEO would confront them. The average 30-year-old MBA graduate is not likely to decide whether to run that pipeline across the pristine wilderness or whether to close the company's manufacturing plant. It's not that ethical theory and high-level strategic dilemmas are not important; unquestionably they are. But they don't help future managers and leaders figure out what to do the next - when a boss wants to alter the financial report, or their sales team applies pressure to misrepresent the capabilities of their product, or they witness discrimination against a peer - and these are the experiences that will shape their ability to take on the strategic, thorny ethical dilemmas in time. The near-term skill set revolves around what to say, to whom, and how to say it when the manager knows what he or she thinks is right when an ethical breech occurs - but doesn't feel confident about how to act on his or her convictions. This overlooked but consequential skill set is the first step in building the ethical muscle. This is the purpose of the Giving Voice to Values program. Faculty at business schools from MIT to INSEAD to Notre Dame to Columbia Busines School to the University of Queensland to the Goa Institute of Management, among many others, have used or developed elements of the pilot curriculum. Our goal is to both build a conversation across the core curriculum (not only in ethics courses) and to also provide the teaching aids and curriculum for a new way of thinking about ethics education. Rather than a focus on ethical analysis, the Giving Voice to Values (GVV) curriculum focuses on ethical implementation and asks the question: 'What if I were going to act on my values? What would I say and do? How could I be most effective?'. In Educating for Values-Driven Leadership: Giving Voice to Values Across the Curriculum, faculty across the business curriculum will find examples, strategies, and assistance in applying the GVV approach in their required and elective courses. In addition to an introductory chapter which explains the rationale and strategy behind GVV, there are twelve individual chapters by faculty from the major business functional areas and from faculty representing different geographic regions. The book is a useful guide for faculty from any business discipline on HOW to use the GVV approach in his or her teaching, and it can also serve as a brief background reading for students who are embarking on their business studies, encouraging them to take the GVV approach to their studies, whether or not it is explicitly introduced in every course.
About
Abstract
This chapter is excerpted from ‘Educating for Values-Driven Leadership: Giving Voice to Values Across the Curriculum'. Despite four decades of good faith effort to teach Ethics in business schools, readers of the business press are still greeted on a regular basis with headlines about egregious excess and scandal. It becomes reasonable to ask why these efforts have not been working. Business faculty in ethics courses spend a lot of time teaching theories of ethical reasoning and analyzing those big, thorny dilemmas - triggering what one professor called 'ethics fatigue.' Some students find such approaches intellectually engaging; others find them tedious and irrelevant. Either way, sometimes all they learn is how to frame the case to justify virtually any position, no matter how cynical or self-serving. Utilitarianism, after all, is tailor-made for a free market economy. As for those 'ethical dilemmas,' too often they are couched as choices that only a chief executive could love - because only a CEO would confront them. The average 30-year-old MBA graduate is not likely to decide whether to run that pipeline across the pristine wilderness or whether to close the company's manufacturing plant. It's not that ethical theory and high-level strategic dilemmas are not important; unquestionably they are. But they don't help future managers and leaders figure out what to do the next - when a boss wants to alter the financial report, or their sales team applies pressure to misrepresent the capabilities of their product, or they witness discrimination against a peer - and these are the experiences that will shape their ability to take on the strategic, thorny ethical dilemmas in time. The near-term skill set revolves around what to say, to whom, and how to say it when the manager knows what he or she thinks is right when an ethical breech occurs - but doesn't feel confident about how to act on his or her convictions. This overlooked but consequential skill set is the first step in building the ethical muscle. This is the purpose of the Giving Voice to Values program. Faculty at business schools from MIT to INSEAD to Notre Dame to Columbia Busines School to the University of Queensland to the Goa Institute of Management, among many others, have used or developed elements of the pilot curriculum. Our goal is to both build a conversation across the core curriculum (not only in ethics courses) and to also provide the teaching aids and curriculum for a new way of thinking about ethics education. Rather than a focus on ethical analysis, the Giving Voice to Values (GVV) curriculum focuses on ethical implementation and asks the question: 'What if I were going to act on my values? What would I say and do? How could I be most effective?'. In Educating for Values-Driven Leadership: Giving Voice to Values Across the Curriculum, faculty across the business curriculum will find examples, strategies, and assistance in applying the GVV approach in their required and elective courses. In addition to an introductory chapter which explains the rationale and strategy behind GVV, there are twelve individual chapters by faculty from the major business functional areas and from faculty representing different geographic regions. The book is a useful guide for faculty from any business discipline on HOW to use the GVV approach in his or her teaching, and it can also serve as a brief background reading for students who are embarking on their business studies, encouraging them to take the GVV approach to their studies, whether or not it is explicitly introduced in every course.